the sound of sweet disappointment

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the science of movement

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the sound of sweet disappointment

combined together
in the recording's part of a single violin

holding wavering note
sustained on the warped old LP

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Musing on the Future 1.4

August 17

I met with him, Maalc1 st33 today. I wonder if I should be offended or angry.

I was escorted into a white interrogation room with three chairs. A white nanotech table was between me and Maalc1. There were two police with us, though st33 wore slim nano cuffs that leashed him to the chair.

What was the actual meeting like? He was and he wasn't what I had expected. His hair was on the long side, and he let it fall down straight over his eyes, so I could barely see them. There was a bruise on the side of his face, and his lip was split. There was truant bad boy sullenness and anger, yes -- in my mind a typical reaction to just about any situation when a thuggy kid gets caught -- a defense mechanism. But I also detected a hidden intelligence, quite beyond any of the scores in his transcripts in labor school -- I thought, if you are so smart, why did you do this to me?

And then st33 looked at me, and he knew what I was thinking, and he jumped up and bellowed as the police dragged him back down, Because I'm down here, and you're up there. Winning the lottery just makes it worse!

He had gotten within a hairs breadth of me, but I hadn't flinched. I didn't move, because I knew he wasn't going to hurt me. Alice was watching on the other side of the two way wall, and I heard later when Maalc1 st33 had jumped at me, she had screamed and almost fell over her own chair.

When we were leaving the station, I told Alice I wanted to adopt him. He still has three years before he was reconsidered as an adult and he was also an orphan. Nobody around here will work with him because of the incident and he'd have to be relocated anyways.

Alice was not happy. No no no. We already have two teenagers, and they are *this close* to being kicked out of the house as it is.

Musing on the Future 1.3

In my opinion, one of the great paradoxes of my wife Alice, for all her natural born and sensible aversion to things "throwback" old fashioned, is her adoration of some of the reconstructed audio CDs I have managed to decipher. When we were dating, I was very much into this process, and I had many complete songs from certain prominent artists cataloged and playable. I had hit the jackpot with an artist called Frank Sinatra.

So after I am awake and we have talked, Alice leaves the room for a moment and them comes back with the Sinatra song "Let's Take it Nice n Easy." and we are together for a long happy moment while it plays.

Pater and Ani hear this, when they come into the room I can see they are both happy and relieved that I am awake, but I can tell that something else is concerning Pater. Alice has started another song, and I don't want to interrupt it.

I listen to the song and as I watch Pater, Ani and Alice, I feel an emotional wave. I suppose it was all coming back to me, lottery, bond fires, etc. But this passed, and when the song was over & a decent iinterval of silence had passed, Pater gave me the news.

I have been cleared of any wrongdoing whatsoever -- in fact, a security CAM a few miles away happened to be at the right angle and with two satellites the whole incident was carefully analyzed. Maalc1 st33, a youth from the neighboring work combine BAT22 was the offender, not even of the village was the attacker which was to everyones immense relief. Maalc1 was subsequently rounded up when he checked in for a morning work detail. The knife was found in a hedge.

The downside was the news of the assault on a T1 by a T5 after winning the WWMML was almost as big as the news of the village winning the WWMML. There were waves of negative editorializing, some of it quite scathing in the UK. But for the Media, the combo was irresistible, and nothing like this had happened for quite a long time. The stops were being pulled out. while I was unconscious all kinds of commentary (some of it shockingly conversationalist/ semi-sympathetic) was coupled with news of spontaneous protests and counter protests that were springing up all over the greater Reconstructed Western Hemisphere --people were debating and talking about MicroMacro economic issues, discussions of economic realignments and job assignments, scoio-generational livelihood structure debates...with all this news, I felt almost embarrassed, like I had somehow broken the camel's back.

Pater, Ani, and Alice all say, don't worry about this -- it will blow over, and I know it will...

August 15

The village has surprise us with several things this morning. Firstly, they have given us a hundred hours of energy. Also, an apology from the mayor for the attack, even though the perp was from BAT22. Alice and I demurred, when it came to assignations of fault, saying that we were just visitors, and that everyone we had been in contact with in the UK and especially Wales were friendly and hospitable to a fault. That pleased the UK media.

I, in turn, surprised the Media, and the village (but not really Pater and Ani, nor Alice) by stating that I would not be pursuing charges against Maalc1 st33, partially because he was 15 years old, but more for "personal ethical reasons". That took some of the wind out of the local constabulary's forces a bit, but it did win me a grudging respect with the T5-3s and the local magistrate who was anti-lockup punishment. I then surprised everyone, including Alice, when I said I would like to meet Maalc1 st33 in person, as soon as it was possible, and the magistrate agreed.

I hope this isn't one of your "saintly experiments" said Alice when we were alone. These country T5 bumpkins can be quite dangerous.

I told her, I didn't know what I was doing, but for some reason I felt compelled to meet Maalc1. I might ask him why he did it, I said.

And what if he doesn't feel like sharing the answer to why, asked Alice. People just do things. Sometimes these people do terrible things. Sometimes.

Hmm. Sometimes.

Musing on the Future 1.2

After that, things went white, and stayed white and silent for what seemed a long time. White white white. No feeling.

Then, I was me again, I don't know how, but I knew I was. But more that this, I seemed to be flying over a fantastic landscape...menacing crags and peaks of numberless mountains and gorges that had no roads, mag lifts, skytracks nor even weather stations, rugged untouched terrain sprinkled with snows and tall trees. Clouds were racing and over the horizon a thunderstorm lumbered, cracking now and again with lightening. I raced towards the broiling storm, and then I saw ahead of me on a crag the impossible spire of a fortress, with one lone burning light in the highest tower.

The scene changed and I felt extremely claustrophobic and uncomfortable. The air was close, stuffy, smelling of dust and smothering decay. I saw a pallid young man who wore elegant clothes from the 19th century, but these were now ragged and soiled. He wore his hair long and had just rinsed his hands and forearms of something in a wide basin, drying them on a towel. Unknowing of me, he turned towards a low burning lamp, working intently, and I could see books, big ones and small ones, of all descriptions--books books! Some where opened, some closed, books carelessly spilling all around him on all surfaces. Amongst the books were curious jars, knives, saws, pincers and specimens. And while I watched, he worked on the project on the bench, and though I could not see what he was about, I felt a crawling loathsomeness in my gut -- the hair raised on my arms. Tension and claustrophobia surged when he stood away from the surface, and I screamed at the impossible sad perverted thing that he had begun just then constructed. He was looking up at me, we looked squarely in each others eyes. I heard rattling chains and a giant grinding noise and the sound BOOM!

I woke up and found myself in bed with a bubble of nano on the side I was stabbed. It was all just an incredible dream -- a melodramatic nightmare straight out of Shelly's book. When she saw I was awake, Alice reflexively grabbed my hand scaring the bejesus out of me. I had to laugh. We both did. And it hurt.

Musing on the Future 1.1

August 6

A few days have gone by in a flash -- with the incredible news & implications overriding everything. In the making of history, a first for the whole of the UK, as a economic unit the small village of Carmarthen has won the World Wide MEGA MEGA Lottery. The WWMML being pulled randomly once every 9 years with over 120 million groups participating, including over 3 billion people chipping in dollars, euros, dinari to chickens. Carmarthen had elected to play the WWMML as a virtual one person unit as a demonstration of economic harmony and unit, and if the village won, all 5 economic categorizations would get equal payouts. With the news legally confirmed & certified everyone is rich, from the top to the bottom.

Winning the WWMML is just too hard to fully take in, as the enormity sinks in the fact feels devastating rather than edifying. Pater and Ani are still stunned. Hell, Alice and I are stunned as well. Carmarthen had to hire phalanxes of renta-cops, robo-sweepers, extra drums of sprayable repair nano, erect temporary traffic controllers and even put up a few polymeric structures for all the reporters, well wishers, gawkers, and shysters trying to get our money. But the funds are safely under lock and key in the village accounts split as encrypted thirds in Bern Greater Switzeland. Palo Alto Republic of California, and Gary Indiana GUSA, just in case through any trick clever malware tries to siphon of a few million before being detected.

August 11

It is quiet tonight, for the first time in many many days. No helocopters, sailjets, train lifts or gliders speckling the sky, rising up and down. With all the funds the village has, and the increased credit rating, there is talk of having built a train lift linking up with the nearest magnetic bullet train station. But just as many other people in the 5 classes are saying let it alone, let it be.

Shotsky 6ertion calls, late as always, but the sprinkling of congratulations and well wishing calls have tapered off.

We hear that there will be a bonfire in the fields tonight on Bryn Myrddin, a sort of ersatz "May Day/We Won the Bleeding Buggery Big Lottery" celebration, and so have decided to check it out. Being T1, we stayed respectfully on the periphery, watching the fires roar, hearing a majority of T5 - T3's mingling and laughing-- then rushing in were throngs of jumping dancers wearing fantastic straw masks. They looked like teenagers. With the arrival of the wild and acrobatic dancers in masks, we found ourselves being enthusiastically greeted and grabbed by many hands, villagers were slapping us on the backs and the general atmosphere was friendly and rowdy with the smell of illicit alcholo.

No longer on the outside, looking in, I was having a Peter Bruegel moment looking at the bright fires contrasted with huge shadows and the dark openings between mingling and ever changing groups of people, light shining through doors and windows and marching alternating silhouettes...swearing, song, some music and laugher, and then screaming.

The crowd turned and was trying to see what was happening. As the crowd was looking, asking, one of the figures in a leering straw mask broke away from the group doing tricks, and came up to me, and before I knew it he stabbed me. After that awful surprise, I don't really remember what happened. I think i heard more screaming, felt violent buffiting as I somehow stayed on my feet -- then many bright lights, like searchlights swinging over the crowd cleaving through smoke as the police arrived. In the meanwhile I had lost sense of me, who I was, there was no Ani, Pater, or Alice/

Musing on the Future 1.0

August 1

In the future, by about OC 2143*, due to rapidly advancing technological progress, in theory there should have been plenty of jobs for everyone, but paradoxically there were less jobs than ever. This then necessitated the marginalization of millions and millions of people by way of criminalization and other types of categorization, reducing whole groups that previously were well-to-do and advanced in technology to hand-to-mouth third-world subsistence levels. This in turn necessitated the creation low tech labor-intensive employment systems based on agriculture, so whole areas of the countryside began to look like medieval Europe. At first, in a way it was as horrifying as it was charming, to see economically realigned "peasants" bringing a harvest in by hand with scythes and horse drawn wagons under a blue sky..something almost out of the Limbourg brother's "Tres Riches Heures"...but the carts are drawn by robots.

I assure you that these new "working classes" are not realigned in a fixed economic model. Adopted world-wide 28 years ago is the most egalitarian socio-economic model progress has ever devised, a sort of rotating 5 tier level of generational occupational functioning model, where cascades of zones, clans, or groups occupy 5 job level or occupational categories, then a generation later, these graded clan or soci-economic group will be graded up to the semi-technological niches, then so on, per generation, until in 5 iterations any one of a series of groups will be "top teir", like us now. The top echelon today is then next-generationaly allocated down one eco socioeconomic occupational tier, as other go up, and so on. I apologize if I am confusing here, it is complicated to try to explain and I did not major in the New Science of Realigned & NEO\\calibrated MicroMacroWorldEconomics.

Now don't worry reader, as I know you are wondering, through all these painful and devastating economic adjustments in western economies and economies all over the world, southern India kept all their jobs, and added more.

If you want to know who is writing this, I'll tell you. My name is Giles Mc17, from Oak Park, and I am on vacation in Wales, England. It is probably not the Wales you remember in the past, weatherly and full of stony somber heaths. No, due to the lingering effects of 21st century global warming (some effects of which were frankly quite pleasant & never totally corrected by Automatic Weather Control Stations), Wales is today a balmy subtropical paradise of Palmento, Date, and King and Queen Palms -- the terrain studded here and there on the westerly coast with lagoons of an azure blue so strong it almost hurts to look into them at mid-day. Alice 5anderi_22 is my common-law wife, she is with me on this trip -- though she does not like to go on extended vacations, which she feel can be sentimental and old-fashioned. I can hear her saying to me, "Going somewhere for a vacation?"

But she and I have been happy on this trip, particularly in the subtropical paradise of Wales, and I am privately thankful and glad. This morning, with the curious antique brass spy-glass mounted on a tripod, I can see her now, down by the beach, she is looking at the fine sea-fruits they are cultivating here -- like Cucumbers, GrapeApples, and NappofruitTM mingled with sea urchins, starfish, anemones and other chordates, echinoderms, and cnidarians in the tide pools.

Later, the owners of this plantation, Pater Ga88mis and his wife Ani 3eripsion-- old SAIC school chums of mine, will show us an interesting cooking technique called "Langry", or "Laangerly", where one cooks a feast on slabs of stone. The stones we will be using tonight are at the main lagoon, not far from the main house that has stood since the mid OC 1400s, a home that once was undoubtedly forbidding and haunted looking under threatening skies. Now I must say, the architecture is completely transformed-- every stone bathed and rejuvenated by strong tropical light, the formerly closed spaces open to soft air and the exciting atmosphere of the sea.

Now back to "Langry", or as Pater says, how the French call it, "La Piere Tombale de Mes Jaques de Frere Graves"**, an expression that Pater finds to be extremely funny, but he won't say why. Laid side by side in a boat, and two people need to move a stone at a time to the beach, though these stones do semi-float in the water. Pater tells me as we move the stones, that the pubs here cook a modified version of Laangerly, where the stones are dark, stained, well seasoned from many uses. The pub stones are a square 2x2 and .5 thick. The banqueting stones we have are new and are 2x7 and .5 thick.

August 2

Pater and I have been secretly "slumming it" a bit -- which means we have been reading old fashioned bound material, called books -- some even being the originals. Pater has a small library of them, saved from the original house, before the legally required nanotech cleaned out and resurfaced every crevice and surface. He keeps these rare publications that have somehow survived the last 100 years of adjustments & catastrophic social, economic, and biological changes in a custom built humadore, set exactly to the appropriate temperature and humidity so these surviving examples of old style literature do not crackle and turn into dust.

We have here the "crown jewel" of the whole collection, what you would call a small trade paperback from the OC 1960s, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Menaced by the barbarity of the images and dialog, we try to imagine a time where people were physically isolated, had extended families, lived in the dark, ate animals, and had unnumbered names. Ani and Alice, being scientists, would not approve of our fascination with the time nor be even faintly amused with the concept of distopic technology. Pater and I are secretly amused by all of the above.

With Pater and I both being archaeologists, specializing in late 20th century ephemera, we keep things under wraps by pretending Pater and I are spending all our resources referencing three 17.5x2.3 core samples of trash from Site 42, section 12.22.1 -- these drillings from an interesting area of the San Marcos California Landfill that was rediscovered two years ago by P8gly Gannerl8 and his bumbling sidekick Favin Ve11 from the SocioRecronstruction AnalyisiGrupo at UCSD. They consist 98% of old National Geographic magazines mailed to Escondido circa OC 1980s, most of them fragmented and warped, now set in a suspension grid where we can scan them in any direction to catalog the color images and text. Adding plausibility of the time we spend in the humadore is the fact that several have oceanic themes. We know ere not going to discover anything new, just fill in the gaps, because Favin V11 did the initial data snapshots and they were good enough.

August 3

Working out two times a day, together to recharge 7 top off power for the house certainly blows away the cobwebs. The house is a marvel, transferring energy passively to the cells when we walk on the floors, move in the house, but we're also using extra energy at night and we agree at selling some as surplus to finance some daytrips to Canterbury and even New London.

Later in the day when we think Ani and Alice are in the village, picking up some small converters for the main branch, we are proverbially caught with our hand in the cookie jar...Ani calls & looks at the humadorCAM -- gets the CAM to shake off the sweatshirt we have casually hung on it and says that they have known for a couple of days what we are up to with that romantic novel, the first tip-off being that a quick anylisis of the core samples indicate we'd have about three days of work tops to completely categorize the cores. So that is it for our clandestine fun with Mary Shelly and her monster. We swear it has been only to do some infoTopo, coordinated with the incomplete NewAmerc Encyclopedia, but the game is up.

Then things get really interesting after dinner, when we have finished dinner and the candles are being lit and hung in the magnifying lanterns. Pater gets a top-rated call and goes out of the room. When he comes back, he looks ashen, yet elated. I pour him a glass of wine. Then he drops the bomb on us.

* Old Count or "Anno Domini" -- by 2044 AD, due to a number of cataclysmic & unforeseen economic, social, and biological catastrophes that began in 2012 AD, the main computer at MSCOm_Corp suggested to the United Nations that the historical epoch be realigned to a version of counting time related to the Mayan "Long Count" calendar, because it was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar. Some hundred years later we have since reverted to using a classic version of the Mayan Calender cycle. The true date is/was N13.6.12.10.1 C9 Mx21 (Normal Year, Chen, Imix)

** Translation from French, "La Piere Tombale de Mes Jaques de Frere Graves" literally means, "The Long Tall Headstone for my Late Brother Jaques' Grave" -- I apologize for the French -- I may have the expression not precise, having Pater say it only twice

The Story of Paul Bunyan

I understand from my research the Paul Bunyan was a mythical gun fighter of the Wild West period of American history. Not only did he Steal from the Rich and Give to the Poor, he also planted thousands of apple trees while on his tireless journey of fighting crime and injustice in the wide open spaces. Paul Bunyan was the inventor of the Franklin Stove, the Telegraph, Tesla Coils, the hated Dewy Decimal System, and Brasso. He pioneered a a system of electrical transmission over twisted wire that later became know as Alternating Current and also perfected a technique for vulcanizing rubber. After falling asleep under a juniper tree in El Paso, Texas in the spring of 1877, Paul Bunyan slept in a sort of suspended animation until he woke up in June 1918 just in time to teleport himself magically to France, where he single handedly defeated the Germans at the battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918. After being congratulated by Douglas Haig, and the grateful soldiers of the 4th army, Paul Bunyan jumped to the dark side of the moon, disgusted with the mechanized slaughter of the modern battlefield and generally doubting the whole concept of modern progress. He then wrote 4,000 best selling novels, but gave no interviews and no one knew exactly where he was. However, in 2001, aliens begged Paul Bunyan to uncover their cryptic Monolith for the People of Earth to find on the surface of the moon, which he did uncover for the advancement of his fellow man.

looking back/ when

looking back

when

i wanted to write poems
like supermodels on runways
strutting their stuff

or write poems like
battleships full speed ahead
through ominous curtails of smoke

i wrote poems
that were barbie dolls
with no genitalia

and wrote poems
like a wooden toy boat in a
tepid bath

drash off this one

dash off this one
like a stone over ice

tossed on
a winter day

scared up small
cold birds

out of boredom
out of spite

dad i/ dream this time we are happy

dad i
dream this time we are happy

i don't
know why we are happy

it just
is a fact and so i don't question it

i wake
up still with that feeling convinced

to be
happy all you have to do

is know
you are happy and end questions there

one day

one day
i run out of gas
i run out of peanut butter
i run out of clean socks
i run out of xerox white copy paper

and
i run out of bismark type battleships
i run out out ancient egyptian monuments
i run out of continents of africa, asia, and america
i run out of the assorted planets of the solar system, including pluto, asshole
i run out of massive black holes or gravity wells that can devour whole galaxies
i run out of brahmanian gods dreaming eons of creation and ultimate destruction of endless muliverses

so today
i run out of love
i run out of fate
i run out of happiness
i run out of everything

no juicy fruit gum
no pope ratzinger
no doornobs
no fake poop
no you
no me

i hope tomorrow
everything
comes
back

The Pin Shower

This morning, when I go outside, a pin falls out of the sky and it lands next to my foot on the front doorstep. Then a fine full shower of pins began to fall, so many of them they look and sound like rain, sweeping down in sheets, pouring over the roof tiles, swirling down the rain gutters, pooling in the street. After the deluge lets up, I search amongst the pins, and there is not a needle to be found.

The next day medium sized paperclips will fall. Then the day after that, a spectacular blizzard of multi-colored acrylic thumb-tacks. How do I know these things? I just do.

A Few of my Nightmares

I have a few nightmares last night -- in one I dream of arguing with my father about how he talks to me. In the dream my dad is dismissive, I am angry, even shrill. In the dream, I tell him I noticed how warm, personal, and engaging he is when he talks to my cousin Bill -- but with me he asks a few polite questions and lets me do all the talking -- essentially rambling like a fool while he sits back. The whole scene in the dream is unpleasant, with no resolution or catharsis, leaving me with the worst feeling. I wake up and I feel as if I have chopped off a finger. But I am so tired, I have to get more rest. When I dream again, I slide into a panic where furniture has to be moved and the movers and packers are gone, and it is too late do do anything about it. Then the baby cries and I give him a new bottle, back to bed, back to sleep where the dreams are monochrome monotonous and boring.